From her window, Misty looks down on the beach where she saw Tabbi for the last time. Where it happened. The boy with short dark hair is wearing an earring, something glittering gold and red. And with nobody to hear it, Misty says, “Tabbi.”
Misty’s fingers gripping the windowsill, she pushes her head and shoulders out and shouts, “Tabbi?” Misty must be half out the window, ready to fall five stories to the hotel porch, and she yells, “Tabbi!”
And it is. It’s Tabbi. With her hair cut. Flirting with some kid. Smoking.
The boy just puffs on the cigarette and hands it back. He flips his hair and laughs with one hand over his mouth. His hair in the ocean wind, a flickering black flag.
The waves hiss and burst.
Her hair. Your hair.
Misty twists through the little window, and the shoe box spills out. The box slides down the shingled roof. It hits the gutter and flips, and the jewelry flies. It falls, flashing red and yellow and green, flashing bright as fireworks and falling the way Misty’s about to, down to shatter on the concrete floor of the hotel porch.
Only the hundred pounds of her cast, her leg embedded in fiberglass, keeps her from pitching out the window. Then two arms come around her, and a voice says, “Misty, don’t.” Someone pulls her back, and it’s Paulette. A room service menu is dropped on the floor. Paulette’s arms come around her from behind. Paulette’s hands lock together, and she swings Misty, spinning her around the solid weight of the full-leg cast, planting her facedown on the paint-stained carpet.
Panting, panting and dragging her huge fiberglass leg, her ball and chain, back toward the window, Misty says, “It was Tabbi.” Misty says, “Outside.”
Her catheter is pulled out again, pee squirted everywhere.
Paulette gets to her feet. She’s making a nasty face, her risorius muscles cinching her face tight around her nose while she dries her hands on her dark skirt. She tucks her blouse back tight into her waistband and says, “No, Misty. No it wasn’t.” And she picks up the room service menu.
Misty has to get downstairs. To get outside. She’s got to find Tabbi. Paulette has to help lift the cast. They’ve got to get Dr. Touchet to cut it off.
And Paulette shakes her head and says, “If they take off that cast, you’ll be crippled for life.” She goes to the window and shuts it. She locks it and pulls the curtains.
And from the floor, Misty says, “Please. Paulette, help me up.”
But Paulette taps her foot. She fishes an order pad out of the side pocket in her skirt and says, “The kitchen is out of the whitefish.”
And just for the record, Misty’s still trapped.
Misty’s trapped, but her kid could be alive.
Your kid.
“A steak,” Misty says.
Misty wants the thickest piece of beef they can find. Cooked well done.
WHAT MISTY REALLY WANTS is a steak knife. She wants a serrated knife to cut through the side of this leg cast, and she wants Paulette not to notice when the knife’s missing from her tray after dinner. Paulette doesn’t notice, and she doesn’t lock the door from the outside, either. Why bother when Misty’s hobbled by a ton of fucking fiberglass.
All night, Misty’s in bed, picking and hacking. Misty’s sawing at the cast. Digging with the knife blade and scooping the fiberglass shavings into her hand, throwing them under the bed.
Misty’s a convict digging herself out of a very small prison, a prison felt-tip-penned with Tabbi’s flowers and birds.
It takes until midnight to cut from her waist, halfway down her thigh. The knife keeps slipping, stabbing and lancing into her side. By the time she gets to her knee, Misty’s falling asleep. Scabbed and crusted in dried blood. Glued to the sheets. By three in the morning, she’s only partway down her calf. She’s almost free, but she falls asleep.
Something wakes her up, the knife still in her hand.
It’s another longest day of the year. Again.
The noise, it’s a car door slamming shut in the parking lot. If Misty holds the split cast closed, she can hobble to the window and look. It’s the beige county government car of Detective Stilton. He’s not outside, so he must be in the hotel lobby. Maybe looking for her.
Maybe this time he’ll find her.
With the steak knife, Misty starts hacking again. Hacking and half asleep, she stabs her calf muscle. The blood floods out, dark red against her white, white skin, her leg sealed inside too long. Misty hacks again and stabs her shin, the blade going through thin skin, stuck into the bone.
Still hacking, the knife throws blood and splinters of fiberglass. Fragments of Tabbi’s flowers and birds. Bits of her hair and skin. With both hands, Misty grabs the edge on each side of the split. She pries the cast open until her leg is half out. The ragged edges pinch her, biting into the hacked skin, the needles of fiberglass digging.
Oh, dear sweet Peter, nobody has to tell you how this hurts.
Can you feel this?
Her fingers stuck with splinters of fiberglass, Misty grips the ragged edges and pulls them apart. Misty bends her knee, forcing it up out of the straight cast. First her pale kneecap, smeared with blood. The way a baby’s head appears. Crowning. A bird breaking out of its eggshell. Then her thigh. Her child being born. Finally her shin breaks up, out of the shattered cast. With one shake, her foot is free, and the cast slips, rolls, slumps, and crashes to the floor.
A chrysalis. A butterfly emerging, bloody and tired. Reborn.
The cast hitting the floor is so loud the curtains shake. A framed hotel picture flaps against the wall. With her hands pressed over her ears, Misty waits for someone to come investigate. To find her free and lock her door from the outside.
Misty waits for her heart to beat three hundred times, fast. Counting. Then, nothing. Nothing happens. Nobody comes.
Slow and smooth, Misty makes her leg straight. Misty bends her knee. Testing. It doesn’t hurt. Holding on to the night table, Misty swings her legs off the bed and flexes them. With the bloody steak knife, she cuts the loops of surgical tape that hold her catheter to her good leg. Pulling the tube out of her, she loops it in one hand and sets it aside.
It’s one, three, five careful steps to the closet, where she takes out a blouse. A pair of jeans. Hanging there, inside a plastic wrapper, is the white satin dress Grace has sewn for her art show. Misty’s wedding dress, born again. When she steps into the jeans and works the button and the zipper, when she reaches for the blouse, the jeans fall to the floor. That’s how much weight she’s lost. Her hips are gone. Her ass is two empty sacks of skin. The jeans sit around her ankles, smeared with the blood from the steak knife cuts in each leg.
There’s a skirt that fits, but not one of her own. It’s Tabbi’s, a plaid, pleated wool skirt that Grace must’ve picked out.
Even her shoes feel loose, and Misty has to ball her toes into a knot to keep her feet inside.
Misty listens until the hall outside her door sounds empty. She heads for the stairs, the skirt sticking to the blood on her legs, her shaved pubic hair snagging on her panties. With her toes clenched, Misty walks down the four flights to the lobby. There, people wait at the front desk, standing in the middle of their luggage.
Out through the lobby doors, you can still see the beige county government car in the parking lot.
A woman’s voice says, “Oh my God.” It’s some summer woman, standing near the fireplace. With the pastel fingernails of one hand hooked inside her mouth, she stares at Misty and says, “My God, your legs.”
In one hand, Misty still holds the bloody steak knife.
Now the people at the front desk turn and look. A clerk behind the desk, a Burton or a Seymour or a Kincaid, he turns and whispers behind his hand to the other clerk and she picks up the house phone.
Misty heads for the dining room, past the pale looks, people wincing and looking away. Summer women peeking from between their spidery fingers. Past the hostess. Past tables three, seven, ten, and four, there’s
